gskinner.com grows again

I’m very happy to welcome 2 more excellent Flash developers onto our team. Say hi to Kyle and Wes, who both started on Tuesday. That brings our little team up to 7 full time people, plus one intern (hi Steph!). I’m pretty excited about our expanding capabilities – it enables us to deliver more innovative and large-scale projects while still having time to experiment and work on internal projects (like gModeler2 and GLIC/mCOM). Speaking of which, if you have a cool project, and are looking for an effective, organized development team to help you deliver it, send us an email.

Hopefully I can convince the new guys to blog a little more often than the existing team. 😉

gProject: A project panel that works.

gProject panel is now available!

I’ve never been happy with the project panel that ships with Flash, so when we had some spare cycles in the office, I decided it was time to rectify it. The result is a very robust project panel that incorporates all of the features we’ve been able to dream up in a tight, easy to use package. We are polishing it up now, and expect to start selling it in the next couple weeks (don’t worry, we’re staying simple with this – paypal or somesuch, so no unpredictable delays on this one).

Here’s some screenshots of this puppy. I’ll try to list all the visible features on each. I’m really excited about this panel. It’s been a huge productivity booster for us, and I’m sure it will be the same for other developers.

Continue reading →

Upcoming events

I’m looking forwards to a few great upcoming events that I’m pleased to be a part of.

FlashForward New York is next week, and it’s looking great. They have added another track of seminars and have some really great speakers lined up. I’m already marking off the sessions I want to attend. I’ll be running a session called “Dissecting Puki“, which looks at the inspiration, code and architecture behind the “Puki: The Swarm” game, as well as participating in a panel on the Flash community, along with some other well known Flashers. Bobi and I are going down early to check out the July 4 fireworks, and have a mini-honeymoon (ya, honeymoon around a Flash conference – how nerdy).

At the end of July, I am speaking at a workshop at the Banff Centre called “Flash’n’Splash“, where attendees get 2 days of Flash training, and a day of white water rafting. Nice! It looks like I will probably be doing a couple of sessions here – one on Puki, and the other on Object Oriented Programming.

I will also be speaking at Macromedia MAX this year in Anaheim about “What’s New in Next Generation Flash“, which should prove to be a lot of fun – 8ball looks like the biggest release since Flash4!

Finally, I plan on running a few workshops later this fall on OOP and/or 8ball – both in my city, and potentially at a few other locations. I’ll post updates when I have them.

Busy, busy.

gBlog redesigned – now with Flash!

I’ve been tinkering with new blog designs for a while now (the current design is almost 2 years old), with a loose goal to incorporate some Flash elements into the design. This was crystallized further by my inclusion in the “Flash Community: Perpetual Virtual Jam Session” panel at FlashForward NYC, which poses the question (among others): “why don’t we use Flash to blog about Flash?”.

I don’t believe Flash is a good medium for a full blog, but I do think that my blog about Flash should utilize the platform (ooo… new buzzword) where it makes sense, and that’s what I’ve tried to do in this new design.

Continue reading →

GLIC Beta Mailing List

Please subscribe to the following mailing list if you are interested in being included in the GLIC beta. Please only sign up if you or your company would be very likely to purchase a license, and you would like to be involved with the final testing. Priority will be given to companies that have demonstrated competence in Flash development and will be able to apply the component set to real projects in the next month or so.

Subscription to the list on this page has been ended. For more information on the beta, and contact info, please see this post.

This is a broadcast-only list (ie. you will not be able to post to it), and will be used to send announcements and information about the beta to interested parties.

We are planning a series of announcements over the next 2 to 3 weeks, most of which will also be posted to this blog.

I’m a Married Man

Bobi and I were finally (9 years together) married on Saturday in the presence of our family and friends. It was a fun (though very tiring) day. The weather was even nice enough to clear up for the photos and the outdoor ceremony (which was lucky given the amount of rain we’ve had in the last week). I’ll be sure to post a few pictures when we get them from the photographer (could be a while).

Things are finally starting to settle down again, and I’m looking forward to married life. I certainly couldn’t ask for a better person to share it with.

Here’s a picture of the big honking man-ring I’m now lugging around.

Next post: glic update.

GLIC update

It’s late, but here’s the latest update on GLIC. Things are on track again, and we will be making an official announcement next week (I’m hoping for early next week, but I will definitely be making the announcement before the end of next week). At that time, we should be setting up a mailing list for all interested parties to keep everyone abreast of developments.

I should also be making a big announcement at FlashForward NYC, who incidentally did a profile about me on their blog today – nifty.

As always, I apologize for the delay – the code side of this project turned out to be the easy part. 😛